When massacres occur, god is behind it?

           

          On Friday, December 14, 2012, a tragedy occurred in Newtown Connecticut where twenty children and six adults were killed in a shooting rampage at Sandy Hook Elementary School. The echoes from the gunfire had barely stopped when the kooks came out to air their impressions on what happened. One group in particular, certain Christians, conveyed the strangest explanations or rationalizations that I have ever heard. God BLESS Sandy Hook? Not since airliners were crashed into the Twin Towers and the Pentagon in September 2001 have there been so many Christian enlightenments and justifications to explain what happened, and why it happened. In a nutshell…god did it.                 
          
                I all but choked on the coffee I was sipping as I listened to one radio talk show and heard a woman, who identified herself as a God-fearing Christian, claim that God saw he needed twenty new angels (apparently He wasn’t aware of the shortage prior to casting His gaze around paradise) and set in motion the events that led to the slaughter.
                For even a second, do you consider it in good taste the implication of what she is suggesting? That God looked around, saw he had twenty fewer angels than he needed to be worshipped or entertained by, (Never mind the six adults, I guess) and sent a mentally unstable man into an elementary school to mow down 6 to 7 year old children?

Now that the killing has stopped, it's time to get on our knees to thank God, or ask God why it happened...and never get a response.

 But of course, other Christian callers quickly hastened to add their own beliefs that God didn’t know this was coming and He was simply making something good out of a bad situation by turning adolescent murder victims into instant angels. (Like making lemonade when you are handed a lemon.) They didn’t stop to think “Why would god work this way?” As the great Greek philosopher Epicurus wrote over 2400 years ago:

Is God willing to prevent evil, but is not able?  Then he is not omnipotent.

Is he able, but not willing?  Then he is malevolent.

Is he both able and willing?  Then whence cometh evil?

Is he neither able nor willing?  Then why call him God?

Why don’t Christians consider this when tragedies occur?

                On another talk show, a caller suggested that because secularists had forced god out of the schools, this is what would inevitably happen. When kids can’t pray Christian prayers in the classroom, when bibles are banned from the library, and when thanking God and Jesus at ceremonies and graduations is prohibited, then we reap what we sow…ergo, mentally unstable, heavy-armed, young, white males will automatically begin thinning out the human herd with gunfire. This caller said that God has turned His back on us because we turned our backs on Him. These kinds of Christians believe that God knows these acts will happen and, if not causing them, simply allows them to happen. I don’t see any difference between the two. It’s an act of malevolence either way.

              Do they really believe God thinks this is reasonable? Killing, or allowing to be killed, children who have done nothing to offend Him, and that they should die in such a horrific manner? What the hell kind of Christian sits around thinking this pile of garbage up? Of course, throughout the Christian bible, God DOES kill children without batting a holy eyelash. For example, God killed children in the tenth plague of Egypt. Their deaths were senseless because there were peaceful alternatives that could have accomplished His goal of getting the Hebrews released by Pharaoh and out of slavery.  When you kill children to accomplish a goal, and that goal could have been achieved without killing them, then their deaths were senseless because they weren't key to reaching that goal. The Proverb about babies being ripped from their mother’s womb certainly sounds like killing innocent kids is part of god’s plan. Also, the great flood in Genesis that only Noah and his seven family members escaped from is another classic example showing that babies and adolescents are not exempt from god's wrath. God doesn’t mind killing children at all. It just has to be for the right reasons. I deliberately didn’t seek any information about how the lunatic fringe at the Westboro Baptist Church would interpret this because I was certain they would blame the whole situation on gays. They most likely insist that, since the U.S. allows homosexuality to exist in our society, God sent this gunman into the school to bring us back to God (their version anyway) in a most shocking manner, by killing children. Homosexuality = murdering kids. WBC has perfected the non sequitur.

                After the massacre, area churches opened their doors for special services in order to make people feel better by telling God what he should do. God apparently didn't know this would happen.

                 If Christians are saying their God allowed these kids to be killed because Americans don’t have the Ten Commandments plastered everywhere, don’t go to church as frequently as they should, don’t pray enough, allow homosexuality, alcohol drinking, and even bowling on Sunday, then they are just as bad as that god they worship, if not worse. Blaming an invisible, nebulous, mysterious supernatural creature is delusional and amounts to passing the buck. However, human beings thinking it up, believing it, insisting others should believe it, and act on it as well, is nothing short of evil...man-made evil.
                God-fearing Christians...if this is the kind of god you believe in, you should be fearful. The rest of us just think you're nuts.